An App Offers Up-to-Date Schedules for Bus and Train Lines

If you’re lucky, you’re reading this somewhere other than Manhattan. For all that it’s been celebrated in song, summer in the city is often a miserable affair. (The lyrics of that Lovin’ Spoonful hit are worth a second listen.) Best to get away, and any app that can help you do that as quickly as Wanderu is worth the space it takes up on your home screen.

Not unlike travel websites like Kayak, Wanderu is a service for finding buses and trains to get you from here to there. It was launched two years ago in the Northeast, then gradually expanded its range before releasing iPhone and Android apps earlier this year. The service is now available in most of the United States.

The Wanderu app’s home screen asks “Where to?” and the temptation to type in all your dream destinations (New Orleans! Arches National Park!) is strong. You can enter the name of a city, but also an exact address or even a landmark. Wanderu is set up to find you a travel option that will get you as close as possible to a specific place. Results can be sorted by time (earliest and latest buses and trains on a given day) and price. Every time someone purchases a trip on Wanderu, the company takes a percentage of the sale from the bus or train company. It doesn’t charge users or use advertising.

Buses are plentiful on the East Coast. But comparison-shopping has long been difficult: There are so many bus lines and their schedules and prices seem to shift constantly. According to Wanderu’s chief executive, Polina Raygorodskaya, a major difficulty was building a middle layer of technology that could gather all the separate companies’ schedules and keep them up-to-date.

Now that Wanderu has that data, and can track user demand, it can actually help companies update and optimize their planning.

“We’ve had some partners add schedules and additional stops because of demand that was brought by our users,” Ms. Raygorodskaya said.

Train schedules, which are far more predictable, are also available through Wanderu. Given the differences between the two modes of travel, it can be a little odd to see a comfortable Amtrak regional train to Boston listed between bus lines. Even the travel experiences between companies — say, the BoltBus and Greyhound — can be vastly different. So it’s somewhat frustrating that Wanderu doesn’t rank trips based on comfort, either by sourcing that information from users or by applying its employees’ knowledge of different companies.

Ms. Raygorodskaya said that because people aren’t prone to leaving positive reviews for bus companies, Wanderu has been loath to incorporate ratings from sites like Yelp. She said that Wanderu plans to solicit feedback from its users, and that it may start offering more information on the quality of trips with specific services. But even if you can’t quite be sure of how comfortable you’ll be while on the road, Wanderu ensures that you can make a quick getaway. And in the summer, that’s what matters most.

Have a favorite New York City app? Send us a tip by email to appcity@nytimes.com or by Twitter to @Jonesieman.